The Politics of Reform

by Julie Des Jardins

At the turn of the twentieth century there was a resurging impulse toward social and political reform. In some ways it continued tendencies already apparent since the industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century, in which white, Protestant, middle-class Americans organized to improve the lives of the urban poor. After the Civil War, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration intensified the inequalities between industrialist and worker, white and non-white, man and woman to such an extent that Americans believed government itself should become an instrument of reform. Particularly after the Depression of 1893 and the influx of more Asians and southern and eastern Europeans into American cities, the only solution appeared to be the systematic legislating of social justice, the curbing of political corruption, and the regulating of corporate forces to keep social strife at bay.More »